Hindsight is 20/20
Can I let you in on a secret? I’m happy right now. Really happy, for the first time in … a long time. I would have liked to give a more exact specification instead to avoid the repeated word, but the truth is, I don’t even really know the last time I was. Quite sad, I know. And on the surface, it seems like there would really be no good reason why, with all the current stress and difficulties I am facing, and which I have also written about here. But there is one big reason why I am cheerful right now, or rather, why I couldn’t feel deeply happy before.
It may sound like a worn cliche at first, but isn’t: I’m happy now, because — maybe for the first time ever — I am really accepting myself. I’m not quite sure how this came about, but I am doing so in many areas; accepting that I have to deal with the situation I am currently in academically (even though there is nothing to feel down about there), accepting that I am having issues with my physical and mental energy that I have to figure out or work around. And part of the reason I am feeling better about these right now is that I somehow came to the realisation that I am not alone in this struggle, that there are others to talk to and compare notes with (yes, also online — and no, I don’t know why I didn’t pursue this earlier), that I cannot wish these issues away, but can work on them. But here, I want to talk about one facet in particular.
And it is hard to write about this, since I have literally never talked about this to anyone. Never wrote about it even just for myself. I have probably avoided — subconsciously — to even think about it. Why? I don’t know. Here are some reasons, very much a product of my rational brain, but maybe some of them true nevertheless: Because I was somehow deeply afraid that this meant something is wrong with me. Because it was easier to label it as something else I was fighting with and just run away, than to invest the energy to investigate more thoroughly. Because it would have meant to challenge societal norms (and ones that I didn’t particularly care about at that). Because it was simply something I was not very interested in, rationally, completely missing how big of a burden the effects of my ignorance were.
I am in my mid-twenties now, and up until very recently, when somebody would ask me about my sexual orientation, I would have confidently answered that I was heterosexual. A self-evident truth; no questions asked. But lately, it has slowly dawned on me that this might be the single biggest — involuntary, of course — dishonesty in my life so far, intellectually as well as emotionally. And in hindsight, it should have been obvious that there was more to the matter — more to myself! — than that. Hence the phrase from the title. I’ve recently heard it used in this context, and trying to be a good scientist this of course makes me cautious about applying it to my own situation, knowing that I might just be projecting somebody else’s ideas, feeling and statements onto me. But I feel that this also being mentioned by someone else was just a mere coincidence, like so many other weird and wonderful coincidences with that person.
So here is my problem: I have no idea how to write about this. Frankly, I don’t even have a clue how to think about it. But I feel that there are some things I should write down, think about. So I am going to do just that in unconnected little pieces down below.
People like boxes. When it comes to gender and sexuality, society traditionally had only two boxes — well, one really, since you were assigned yours at birth; the heterosexual one of your biological gender. Then, homosexuality became a thing. Well, I’m quite sure it was a thing long before that, but it became present in society and widely accepted (apart from some people who believe they have some sort of moral authority over the bodies of others, godly or otherwise). In the last decades, Western society has gained quite a few more labels, first LGBT, then the whole LGBTQIA+ alphabet soup.
But in the end, they are still all labels for boxes. And I get why people like them. Because they are useful. They make it easier to talk, maybe even to think about things. Because they can be comforting. Giving you the feeling of not being homeless, having found your box, giving you the opportunity to neatly decorate its interior. For a very long time now, however, I have been trying hard not to put people into boxes. Whether this always seemed strange to me, or it was the result of experiencing how it feels when people are trying to apply their boxes to you, I don’t know. But I get how they can be useful, and trying to find some that fit myself should at least be some interesting food for thought.
So, without further ado, here are some labels I would apply to myself. Cis-male. Sexuality-wise, certainly neither 100% straight or gay, perhaps pansexual would be the best description. And a fair hike up the asexuality triangle, although certainly — at least I think — not at the very end of the tip.
I am still unsure about these labels. Maybe because it takes time to consciously adopt an arbitrary term somebody else coined into being part of your identity. Maybe because I suspect that it could just be a fad, an ephemeral product of my current circumstances rather than bringing me any closer to myself. But as a starting point for further exploration, these should do well enough.
Cis-male. That’s a funny one. Why funny? Because gender is on everybody’s mind — and quite understandably so — , but I never really cared that much about this particular facet of my self-description. Now, if you happen to be reading this as a random feminist or LGBT person, and your knee-jerk reaction is, “Of course he was never interested in it, being white and (cis-)male makes it only all too easy for him to do that,” then you might be in for a surprise.
Well, there might be a certain point to that in so far as I was rarely ever discriminated against based on my race and gender, which might have forced me to think about these issues. But to be completely honest, I am not sure how much it even means when I say I am a man. Does it mean I somehow naturally identify with behaving like a man? What does this even mean? I would argue that most of these expectations are just gender stereotypes, an arbitrary and mostly dispensable construct of society, just like all too much else is.
Sure, there are things about these stereotypes I like. Being a gentleman is fun, most of the time. But I would do that regardless of my gender anyway. And there are other things I do which would not quite be compatible with traditional male stereotypes, although the latter rarely ever occurs to me. Some of them utterly trivial, like crossing my legs while sitting more readily than most men seem to do. Or moving my hips while dancing. Well, granted, I do quite a bit of Latin, and it’s expected there, but it never felt unnatural to me (and I have bemused memories of a Bachata course where it drew the envy of the female half of the class). Hell, speaking of less formal club dancing now, I think many of the more girly dance moves would appear quite natural to me. (Hmm — a possible explanation for why I could never really enjoy dancing in clubs?) What I am getting to is I never really took my gender to be nearly as defining a part of my identity as I think many other people do. It is something that I only rarely feel constricted or guided by.
Of course, there is still the question of my body. And all I can say about this, really, is that I am, all in all, feeling at home in my body. Sure, at times I would preferred it to be different in various ways, maybe more muscular, better at throwing balls, more symmetrical, whatever. And definitely more energetic. But in terms of gender identity, I am happy with what — who — I am.
Reflecting on this a bit more, I do sometimes wonder how certain things would feel if my body was changed into having female parts. Being touched in certain places, being aroused, that sort of thing. But the only takeaway from such thoughts that I could probably feel at home in a body of either sex. Does that make me agender, or something else on the non-binary spectrum? I don’t think so, although I might come back to this in the future. I am comfortable being male, in my male body, from pronouns all the way to sexuality. But I don’t define myself through this, nor through gender stereotypes, which are really just that — stereotypes.
Turns out the previous section was surprisingly easy to write. Which makes sense, since it is just about myself, and as I pointed out in the beginning, I am quite happy with myself right now. Turns out that there are also other people on this planet, and this is invariably where things get difficult. Have always been difficult for me in a sense, not just in relation to romantic and sexual matters. But of course especially concerning the latter. Where do I even start? This might need to be even more stream-of-consciousness-like than the previous parts, otherwise I am never getting anywhere.
So let’s start with this: I am unsure about my sexuality. Not the type of unsure where you can’t seem to choose between two smoothie flavours in the grocery store. The one where you have the feeling that you manifestly don’t know enough to give an answer. And it is easy to deduce what the biggest reason for this probably is: The fact that I have never really, fully enjoyed sleeping with somebody yet. We’ll get to that in a bit, but first, let’s talk about attraction.
When I wrote earlier that asexuality might be a part of me, this definitely does not mean I am not attracted to people. First of all, yes, my libido is quite high, as it tends to be for most young male adults. I used to get erections whenever the wind just blew in the right direction, and still do quite regularly (and apparently also quite sizeably so, although this is irrelevant for the present discussion). The reasons vary, and probably warrant closer inspection, but I don’t currently attach much meaning to it — I’m a typical healthy male adult in that regard, and by itself this is only an anatomical fact.
This statement only really gets interesting when comparing it to my sexual life. The credibility of various figures on the distribution of the number of sexual partners is somewhat hard to assess, but it seems to be fairly reliable that the average number for somebody my age is about seven or eight. Suffice it to say that I have made a lot fewer experiences than that. And I don’t think the reason for this is that I just was not getting any, although it sometimes seemed that way. It seems like the fundamental reason for this — and I should point out that I don’t consider this to be a negative thing — might well be how my desires for relationships are shaped.
I do experience superficial attraction to people. Mostly it’s women who seem to affect me in that trivial way, although there are exceptions. What I really desire, though, is closeness. Intimacy. Not putting body parts into other body parts. The natural way for me there is getting to know somebody, having a fun time with them. Many people who have been interested in me didn’t make it past this stage, even though I was desperately looking for intimacy (which I might or might not have believed to be a desire for sexual contact). They didn’t — or rather, our relationships didn’t — because I didn’t feel I could fully be myself around them, while enjoying myself. Either, because I felt that they couldn’t deal with the raw me (sometimes simply because of mental capacity), or because I felt they were mainly looking for somebody to distract them from their petty problems.
What about sex, then? While I was still a virgin, I expected it to be that great thing that would make heavens ring and make me universally feel good. Turns out, it isn’t exactly that, and much more fundamentally so than just because of idealistic teenage dreams. Now, of course, having had “proper” sexual contact with exactly one girl isn’t exactly enough data to make any definite statements about my sexuality. But what I think I can say from that is that I really was mistaken. Sex alone certainly isn’t what I was after, and may or may not be part of what I am after at all. The experiences I had was with a person who did care about me, but for whom sex was mainly about having sex. Whether I will be able to truly enjoy it at some point, I don’t know. But if so, intimacy will certainly need to be the major part of it.
Now, it has happened to me more than once, unfortunately, that I did slowly get to know somebody who I was more than superficially interested in. That things got to a point where I was really, really wishing for more intimacy, but it turned out that they weren’t really interested in me romantically. And this is why the jury is still out on my sexuality. I do hope that it will be a great thing to experience with somebody I desire from the bottom of my heart, since that is certainly the way it feels in my dreams. But it could well happen that I discover that I am actually an ace. In which case: Meh, whatever. Cuddling is awesome too.